The fourth season of the European Poker Tour came to a climax this week as the PokerStars.com EPT Grand Final was played out at the Monte Carlo Bay Hotel and Resort. 

A total of 842 poker players took part in Europe’s biggest and most lucrative poker tournament.  Many top professionals were in attendance all hoping to capture the coveted title.

It was, however, a 22 year-old business student from Canada named Glen Chorny who prevailed to become EPT Grand Final Champion.  His win has made him a millionaire as he earned nearly £1.6 million for winning the event.  Just like Jason Mercier who recently won the EPT San Remo, Chorny was a PokerStars qualifier.

After 4 days of play, the starting field of 842 players was narrowed down to the last eight who would contest the final table, all guaranteeing themselves big bucks.  These players and their chip counts at the start of final table play were:

Seat 1: Denes Kalo (1,190,000 chips)
Seat 2: Michael Martin (1,320,000 chips)
Seat 3: Luca Pagano (688,000 chips)
Seat 4: Valeriy Ilikyan (1,396,000 chips)
Seat 5: Antonio Esfandiari (501,000 chips)
Seat 6: Maxime Vilemure (1,206,000 chips)
Seat 7: Glen Chorny (3,613,000 chips)
Seat 8: Isaac Baron (2,853,000 chips)

Antonio Esfandiari was seeking an EPT title to go with his WPT and WSOP titles.  However, he had to settle with eighth place as he lost out in a battle with Luca Pagano.

Pagano of Team PokerStars was competing at his third EPT final table and despite being the short stack at the start of play had done well to eliminate Esfandiari.  It wasn’t to be third time lucky for the Italian, however, as he was eliminated in sixth place. 

Isaac Baron was widely regarded as tournament favourite and has the reputation of one of the world’s finest online poker players.  Eventually though he was to come unstuck to Chorny and the American was out in fourth place.  For his efforts he earned over £464,000.

Besides Chorny the other two players that survived to play the three-handed action were Frenchman Maxime Vilemure and Hungary’s Denes Kalo.  This was to be a long drawn out three-way encounter.  The three-way action concluded after Kalo lost half his stack to Vilemure.  A couple of hands later though, Vilemure lost all of his chips to Chorny in a straight over straight debacle.  Just over £566,000 was Vilemure’s reward for third place.

Going into the heads-up Chorny was strong favourite to defeat Kalo as he had a 10 – 1 chip lead.  Just like in the EPT San Remo, the heads-up lasted just 2 hands.  Chorny defeated Kalo to join the millionaire’s club.  Kalo although perhaps disappointed to lose the biggest poker tournament in Europe to a North American, should be pleased with becoming £930,000 richer for his second place prize.

AS well as the prize money Chorny receives the trophy as well as the prestige of being the new EPT Grand Final Champion.

That’s it for season 4 of the PokerStars European Poker Tour, season 5 starts in September with the EPT Barcelona.

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